Barbenheimer and The Summer Movie Wrap Up

I did very badly in the Summer Movie Wager this year, but so did just about everybody else.

So here's the actual domestic box office rankings for this summer:

1. Barbie

2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

4. Oppenheimer

5. The Little Mermaid

6. Sound of Freedom

7. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

8. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part I 

9. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

10. Elemental

And here's what I predicted back in April:

1. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part I 

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 

3. Fast X 

4. The Flash 

5. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 

6. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 

7. The Little Mermaid

8. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

9. Oppenheimer 

10. Barbie

I didn't manage to get a single film in the right position, but I got three pretty close ("Guardians," "Indiana Jones," and "Transformers"), "Mermaid" in the right ballpark, and nothing else remotely right.  Frankly, like most people I did not see the Barbenheimer behemoth coming.  I did not expect "Fast X" and "The Flash" to bomb so badly they didn't make the top ten.  And nobody saw "Sound of Freedom," an action film that was independently produced by some incredibly shady people, breaking into the mainstream.  This is the most fun I've had watching the box office in a long time, and honestly I'm delighted that art seems to have kinda won out over commerce this year.  The movies at the top of the chart are mostly very well reviewed, and display more ambition and originality than the bombs.  Of course, that's not the whole story.

The summer of 2023 is going to be one we're talking about for a long time.  Ticket sales are finally back to pre-pandemic levels.  There's a historic strike going on, though It's hard to say how much of an effect it had on any specific marketing campaigns.  The lack of talk show appearances certainly didn't seem to hurt the more popular films.  I had a post earlier about the disastrous underperformance of many major franchise titles that were released in June, but then came July and the incredible success of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer."  Superhero fatigue has been pointed to as a potential reason for the failure of films like "The Flash," but after "Indiana Jones" and "Mission: Impossible" both stumbled, I think the issue may be broader.  

My pet theory is that the current crop of action-adventure films aimed at the young male demographic have just gotten too safe and repetitive.  A few superhero films did great, like "Guardians" and "Spider-Verse," which had strong reviews and really felt like proper event films.    However, it proved much harder to drum up excitement for the fifth "Indiana Jones" adventure, the seventh "Mission: Impossible" and "Transformer" bouts, the tenth "Fast" cameo-fest, and however you want to count "The Flash."  This isn't an issue with their quality - "Mission: Impossible" got fantastic notices and I adored the stupid fun of "Fast X."  It's an issue with their familiarity.   

And Barbenheimer?  The memes helped with the hype, and the "Barbie" marketing campaign was fantastic, but what really sealed the deal was that both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" pinged as different enough from the fantasy-action slurry that they came across like something new and interesting.  They got lots of people who hadn't been in a theater since before the pandemic to come out and have a good time.  Though "Barbie" is based on a toy brand, it felt like an auteur-driven project with genuine artistic credibility thanks to Greta Gerwig.  Though "Oppenheimer" is a three hour biopic, Christopher Nolan's reputation for quality filmmaking got people in seats.    

What I find the most exciting about Barbenheimer is that audiences were clearly ready for this.  They wanted to be in theaters with big crowds.  The studios have been so fixated on catering to the action audience, it feels like they just forgot about everyone else over the past few years.  All the metrics for success have been based off of the performance of superheroes and endless franchises.  And this summer, that all had to be thrown out the window, because things have changed.  "Barbie" is the biggest film in Warners' entire hundred year history.  Jim Caviezel is completely off his rocker and a bona fide leading man again.  A PIXAR movie turned out to be a minor sleeper hit.  

Alas, the strike makes capitalizing on this new box office momentum difficult, but that's a post for another day…      

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My Favorite Keisuke Kinoshita Film

I waited to write about Keisuke Kinoshita's 1958 film,"The Ballad of Narayama" until I'd seen the more acclaimed 1983 version of the same story, directed by Shohei Imamura.  The two films are radically different, and I like Kinoshita's version better.  This is entirely a matter of taste, as both films are very strong.  Imamura's is more brutal and more crudely naturalistic, almost certainly meant to distinguish itself from the more stylized visuals in the Kinoshita film, released twenty-five years earlier.  I, however, have always been a sucker for pretty colors, and love Kinoshita's kabuki-inspired production design, the lyricism of the idealized nature elements, and the elegant cinematography.

Kinoshita's visuals are purposefully designed to look dreamlike and artificial, setting the scene for a story with roots in myth and legend.  It's introduced by a black-clad narrator, who draws back a literal curtain to usher us into the film.  The environments were almost all constructed on soundstages, including the terrain for the final trek up an imposing mountain.  The approach reminds me of the roughly contemporaneous MGM musicals like "Brigadoon," with their hyperreal recreations of the picturesque locales.  The village in "The Ballad of Narayama," however, is very remote and poor.  Life there is so hard that families have a cruel custom of abandoning their elderly on the mountaintop when they reach the age of seventy.  "The Ballad of Narayama" revolves around the mother and son pair of Orin and Tatsuhei, who carry on this tradition out of love, despite neither wanting to part from the other.  Orin is still healthy and contributes to her community, but food is scarce, and everyone is on the brink of starvation with winter approaching.

For such a beautiful film, the story is often brutal.  A subplot involves a neighbor who is already over seventy, and comes to a truly terrible end because he bitterly resists his fate, until his son resorts to violent measures.  In another, a food thief is discovered, leading to awful reprisals against his entire family.  The Imamura version is more visceral in portraying these incidents, drawing parallels between the actions of the villagers and wild animals.  Kinoshita's more idealized, more stylized approach allows the viewer more narrative distance, creating space to consider the story in more allegorical terms.  However, the emotional power of the performances and the mise en scene is not diminished.  I especially enjoy the performance of Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, the self-sacrificing maternal ideal, committed to making the most of her final days.  Amazingly, she was only in her late forties at the time the film was made.                    

Keisuke Kinoshita was a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and produced a very eclectic variety of titles, but was best known for sentimental romances and stirring melodramas, like the wartime memoir, "Twenty Four Eyes."  However, he was also an important innovator in Japanese cinema, directing the first Japanese film in color, "Carmen Comes Home," in 1951.  Other Kinoshita films feature fanciful attempts to recreate the aesthetics of classical Japanese artworks.   Examples include the masking effects to denote flashbacks in "She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum," and the spot color and woodblock print designs in "The River Fuefuki."  These experiments were often not very successful or poorly received, and many have aged badly.  However, I still find them admirable, as rough as they are. 

 

"The Ballad of Narayama" stands out from Keisuke Kinoshita's filmography, for being one of the boldest films he ever made, combining theatrical traditions with cinematic forms in a way that's still impressive to this day.  You can see its influence all over Japanese cinema, especially in the later period films from Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi.  Kinoshita's "Narayama" didn't get the warm international response that Imamura's did upon release, but both are held in equally high regard today, partly thanks to an excellent Criterion release and some overdue reevaluation.  And it has become very difficult to talk about one version of "Narayama" without the other.    

What I've Seen - Keisuke Kinoshita

Port of Flowers (1943)

The Living Magoroku (1943)

Jubilation Street (1944)

Army (1944)

Morning for the Osone Family (1946)

Carmen Comes Home (1951)

Twenty Four Eyes (1954)

She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955)

The Ballad of Narayama (1958)

The River Fuefuki (1960)

Immortal Love (1961)

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Inching Into "The Crowded Room"

Major spoilers ahead.

There have been attempts to turn "The Minds of Billy Milligan" novel by Daniel Keyes, and the court case it was based on, into a movie since the 1980s.  That's probably why the eventual miniseries adaptation, "The Crowded Room," feels like such a throwback, not just to older media about dissociative identity disorder (DID), but to older media about court cases.  The first half of the show is essentially a counselor/patient interrogation, where a psychiatrist, Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), interrogates a young man named Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland) about a shooting he committed with a girl named Ariana (Sasha Lane).  The second half transitions into a court case, leading up to the big climax where Danny takes the witness stand to bolster an insanity defense.

I'm spoiling the fact that the show is about DID because, frankly, it's pretty obvious that this is the case from very early on, though it takes "The Crowded Room" fully seven episodes to get around to admitting it.  Frankly, this is a massive blunder, and negatively impacts the entire series.  Danny's backstory and account of the crime should have taken up two or three episodes at most, before we learned the truth.  Instead, series creator Akiva Goldsmith spends way too long on the build up and insists on playing the existence of Danny's "alters" like a twist, despite Danny's narrative being so ridiculous that clearly something is up long before the reveal.  It's so frustrating to see play out, because the cast is good, the production values are high, and there's a lot of strong material here.  The penultimate episode is an outstanding hour of television, featuring Emmy Rossum as Danny's troubled mother Candy.  Unfortunately, it requires way, way too much slogging through the early episodes to get there.    

A lot depends on the performance of Tom Holland, who plays Danny.  Holland has now had a string of these ambitious, but very flawed projects, and I respect that he just keeps throwing himself at them.  Danny is a demanding part, not just because of the alters, but because it requires a lot physically.  There are violent altercations, chase sequences, and simulated drug use, in addition to the heavy emotional material.  There's also a terrible wig that is very distracting.  Holland is okay here - not very interesting, but perfectly competent.  It helps that he's surrounded by strong supporting performers like Seyfried, Christopher Abbot as Danny's lawyer Stan Camisa, Will Chase as Danny's stepfather Marlin, and Jason Isaacs as a mystery man named Jack.

There's so much to like about "The Crowded Room," and so much effort was clearly expended on its creation, but the approach to this story was fundamentally wrongheaded.  Putting aside the terrible execution of this premise, I have to question why you'd want to tell this story in 2023, and tell it in such a straightforward, familiar manner.  Oh, it was smart to use a fictionalized version of Billy Milligan, since there's a lot about the real Milligan and the outcome of his court case  that are deeply troubling.  And the depiction of DID is more nuanced than what we see in other media about the subject like "Sybil," and far more responsible than modern genre stories with DID protagonists like "Mr. Robot" and "Moon Knight."  However, it still leans into the sensationalization and treats the audience like DID is somehow a new concept that hasn't been overused in media for decades.

One part of "The Crowded Room" I can recommend without reservations is the animated opening title sequence, one of the best I've seen all year.  And I've already singled out the ninth episode for praise, which does a fantastic job of addressing domestic violence issues.  If "The Crowded Room" had been done as a movie or a much shorter miniseries or framed its story differently, I'd probably be more inclined to give it a pass.  However, I find myself very short on patience these days when it comes to media that wants to play dumb.  If it weren't for the efforts of the cast, especially Amanda Seyfried, and my initial misconception that this was a six-episode miniseries instead of a ten-episode miniseries, I'd probably have ditched this after the first week.     

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Scaling "Silo"

The great thing about "Silo" is that it's a post-apocalyptic science-fiction puzzle box story with excellent worldbuilding.  You learn about the massive Silo, housing thousands of people underground, how their society functions, how they lost their history in some past power struggle, and how they believe that it's not safe to go outside.  Just enough information is trickled to the audience, little by little, to keep the mystery compelling.  The trouble with "Silo" is that it starts out very strong with two episodes starring Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo trying to resolve their existential questions about the Silo, but the following eight episodes are about an entirely different character, played by Rebecca Ferguson, trying to solve a murder mystery.  We eventually do get to the big picture questions, but it takes an awfully long time to loop back. 

The story is kicked off with a hard drive, a forbidden "relic" that is discovered by a tinkerer named George (Ferdinand Kingsley), who recruits an IT worker, Allison (Jones) to help him access it.  This leads to several deaths. Mayor Jahns (Geraldine James) decides to appoint a new sheriff - not Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche), the candidate being pushed by the Silo's enforcement organization, Judicial, but a generator engineer named Juliette Nichols (Ferguson), who is the choice of the previous sheriff, Holston (Oyelowo).  Juliette is George's ex, and convinced that he was murdered rather than dead by suicide.  She decides to investigate, despite the concerns of Paul, now her new deputy, and opposition by the Silo's glowering head of security, Robert Sims (Common), who may actually be running everything in the Silo.  Other characters include Juliette's fellow engineer Martha (Harriet Walker), the head of IT, Bernard (Tim Robbins), a stargazer named Lukas (Avi Nash), Juliette's father (Iain Glen), and another deputy, Marnes (Will Patton).  

I've never read the "Silo" books or stories, but I am familiar with the franchise's history.  It was originally expanded from a group of short stories into a full novel, and from there into a series.  This accounts for some of the wild POV switches in the first part of the show.  I like that we get to explore the Silo from different POVs, and see everyone's different ways of coping with living in such an oppressive world.  The show's sci-fi concepts will be very familiar to anyone who has read or watched any dystopian media, but the familiar murder mystery framing goes a long way in helping "Silo" to feel  more grounded in reality than similar stories like "Snowpiercer."  The characters are stronger than what you usually get in puzzle box media, their stories are more relatable, and this is the first show I've seen in a while where it feels like anyone is truly expendable.  This is absolutely necessary, because the pace of the series is fairly slow, and we're not going to be getting answers to the big questions for a while.

The production quality, however, is very high, and the talent involved is excellent.  Created by "Justified" showrunner Graham Yost, with a ton of high profile actors and directors, this was clearly meant to be a prestige project from the outset.  "Silo" often involves environments like the generator, cafeteria, and stairwells that are massive - and from what I can tell they were often practical sets.  It feels very much like an Apple TV+ series in the same vein as "Foundation" and "Extrapolation," willing to be a little more ambitious and trust the audience to keep up.  The ideas here are very compelling, and the performances are strong, but I do think that the show should have cut an episode or two for pacing.  Alternately, it could have committed to the anthology structure and actually let each episode be told from a different character's POV - there are certainly enough strong talents in the ensemble that this could have been feasible.     

In any case, it's nice to have one of these dystopian series that is so thoroughly committed to its premise.  I like that it's very straightforward, with very little by way of twists and turns, and plays fair when it comes to the mystery.   It barely even seems interested in much social allegory at this point, though that may change.  No, we don't get very many answers, but the ones that we do get are satisfying and well considered.  I look forward to seeing more.      

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"Schmigadoon!" Year Two

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

I'm much better acquainted with the musicals of the '60s and '70s than I am with their Golden Age counterparts, so "Schmicago" had more of my interest from the outset.  Josh and Melissa return, now married and seeking their way back to Schmigadoon on purpose, after hitting a rut in their real lives.  However, they end up in Schmicago, which parodies darker, more transgressive musicals like "Chicago," "A Chorus Line," "Sweeney Todd," and "Sweet Charity."  Many of the actors from the first season are back, but in different roles.  Dove Cameron is playing Jenny, a burlesque dancer, Alan Cumming is Dooley, a vengeful butcher, and Kristin Chenoweth is running the orphanage from "Annie." 

There are a couple of new faces in the cast, including Patrick Page as this year's big villain, the evil tycoon Octavius Kratt, and Tituss Burgess is the new narrator, who becomes more and more fed up with his job as the season goes on.  We also get a lot more Jane Krakowski, now playing a hotshot lawyer, Bobby Flanagan, with thrilling results.  She gets one of the big highlights of the season, the "Bells and Whistles" number, patterned after "Razzle Dazzle" from "Chicago," that has her on roller skates and a trapeze in the courtroom.  The musical numbers are bigger and wilder this year, and there are a lot more of them.  Melissa is maneuvered into becoming a cabaret performer as part of her character arc this year, so Cecily Strong gets to sing more too.       

"Schmicago" is a lot looser and more free-form than "Schmigadoon!" with a less formulaic plot.  The magic leprechaun simply charges Melissa and Josh with finding a "happy ending," and leaves them to muddle through a murder mystery that almost immediately gets cast aside so we can get to know a bunch of other colorful characters.  This season is trying to mash some very different, incongruous influences together, and not even trying to make them all feel consistent.  The hippies led by Aaron Tviet's Topher, a spoof on the leads of "Godspell" and "Hair," aren't remotely from the same era as the flappers of "Chicago," and the music is constantly swinging from Stephen Sondheim to Stephen Schwartz to Paul Williams, and somehow it all works.  There are opportunities for delightful mashups like "Good Enough to Eat," which is an unholy combination of "Sweeney Todd" and "Annie," and room carved out to pay tribute to "A Chorus Line," because you've got pay tribute to  "A Chorus Line," don't you?

The material this season also feels more accessible, probably because its much more recent.  Everyone's still playing wild caricatures, and Melissa and Josh are still pointing out their tropeyness, but the world feels bigger and everyone's worldviews are broader and more complex.  Seeking self-fulfillment is in many ways more relatable than seeking romantic love, and I'm not surprised that Josh and Melissa take more of a shine to "Schmicago" faster.  I like the humor this season better too.  There are still the silly running gags, like a sloshed Karin Konoval continuously popping up with a martini glass to shout "I'll drink to that!" but also a lot of darker bits and meta humor.  There are some great surprises and payoffs in the second half of the season.  The references for fans of musicals have also been ramped way up, to the point where I was even catching little things in the orchestrations.

I really want "Schmigadoon!" to continue into the Andrew Lloyd Weber era, and I'm already mentally working out who should play the Phantom analog, and who should play Rum Tum Tugger.  And could they get away with calling it "Schmanadu"?  I mean, it's less of a mouthful than "Les Schmiserables."     

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"Schmigadoon!" Year One

I binged the first two seasons of Apple's "Schmigadoon!" over two days.  Each season is only six episodes, and the episodes are only around thirty minutes apiece, so this wasn't difficult.  "Schmigadoon!" is a series I kept putting off, being wary of the first season's aggressively wholesome vibes.  However, when the second season started airing, and I finally got it into my head that this wasn't just a musical parody show, but a show that was a [i]parody of musicals[/i], I was onboard.

Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong) are two New York doctors in love, who go on a backpacking retreat together to work out some relationship tensions.  They wind up in the strange little town of Schmigadoon, where everyone behaves as if they're in a Golden Age 1950s musical, breaking out into song and dance numbers at every opportunity.  When Josh and Melissa discover they're stuck there, and can only leave when they find true love, their relationship is further jeopardized.  

Created by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, with every episode in the first season directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and with a ton of Broadway vets in the cast, "Schmigadoon!" takes the assignment of being a musical pastiche very seriously.  The songs are catchy, the performances are keen, and the production design has a wonderful look of unreality about it, aping the look of the old MGM spectaculars.  I've seen a good amount of musicals from this era, enough to pick out some of the references to specific shows, songs, and characters.  The title comes from "Brigadoon," and the various townsfolk share a lot in common with the ones found in  "The Music Man," "Oklahoma," "Carousel," and "The Sound of Music."  You have the insightful schoolmarm Emma (Ariana DeBose), stern Doc Lopez (Jaime Camil), the gregarious Mayor Menlove (Alan Cumming), the meek Reverend Layton (Fred Armisen), his uptight wife Mildred (Kristen Chenoweth), the rapscallion carnie Danny (Aaron Tveit), and the teenage temptress Betsy (Dove Cameron).  Martin Short also shows up for a cameo as the leprechaun from "Finian's Rainbow."     

Josh, who doesn't like musicals, and Melissa, who does, find themselves inhabiting new roles and getting caught up in some familiar plots as they search for love.  A lot of the show's humor comes from the two of them pointing out and commenting on the absurdity of the tropes they see, and occasionally warping them to their own ends.  Melissa, for instance, delivers a cheerful sex-ed lesson to two expectant parents with a tune very reminiscent of "Do-Re-Mi" from "The Sound of Music."  She later shuts down a dream sequence ballet before it can get underway, grumbling that nobody likes them.  However, "Schmigadoon!" also plays the love story of Josh and Melissa straight.  Most episodes begin with a flashback to important moments in their relationship, and we're definitely supposed to root for them to end up together.

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who isn't a fan of musicals, because there are a lot of musical numbers in the show, put together by people who clearly love all the over-the-top theatricality that they're making fun of.  My biggest complaint with the first season is that they don't go big enough, or give enough of the individual performers the chance to shine the way they do in the second.  There are plenty of big set pieces and solos, like Kristin Chenoweth singing "Tribulation," the "Schmigadoon!" version of "Trouble" from "The Music Man," but her villain character is so dour, it takes a lot of the fun out of it.  Jane Krakowski shows up for two episodes to play a romantic rival for Melissa, and disappears just as she's starting to get interesting.

I like the first season of "Schmigadoon!" fine as sweet, feel-good entertainment, just the way I like the musicals that it's lampooning.  However, the second season is such an improvement, I can't help but think of these initial episodes as necessary setup for far better to come.  But more on that next time.       

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The Ambitions of "Extrapolations"

We've been seeing climate change addressed in science fiction media more and more often, but usually obliquely.  "Extrapolations" is one of the few shows I've seen that tackles the uncomfortable subject head-on.  It's an anthology series, created by Scott Z. Burns, which presents various stories set at various times between 2037 and 2070 in a world drastically changed for the worse by climate change.  An all star cast has been recruited, including Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Marion Cotillard, Toby Maguire, Forest Whittaker, Sienna Miller, Kit Harrington, and Daveed Diggs.  Unfortunately, despite a lot of good intentions and a lot of resources being expended on the project, "Extrapolations" is pretty underwhelming.

I like the anthology format, which gives Burns a chance to explore climate change from many different points of view.  One episode is about a scientist played by Sienna Miller having conversations with the last whale.  One episode is about a rabbi played by Daveed Diggs trying to save a Florida synagogue that is threatened by rising floodwaters.  One episode is set in India, about a delivery driver played by Adarsh Gourav making a dangerous delivery.  One episode, directed by Nicole Holofcener, involves a dinner party where characters debate embracing a wholly digital existence.  We watch these characters deal with biodiversity loss, wild weather fluctuations, and many other disastrous outcomes up close.  New diseases and ailments become commonplace.  New technologies are created to try and mitigate the worst of the damage, but these are controlled by greedy corporations that never act for the common good.  

Some of the installments are significantly better than others.  The Daveed Diggs episode is my favorite because it's one of the most personal, with characters that feel the most real.  Most of the other episodes get too bogged down in the science fiction conceits, and are difficult to connect to on a human level.  For instance, the crucial fourth episode sees a desperate attempt to curb the crisis through geoengineering, but much of the drama plays out through conversations between the members of an estranged family.  This doesn't work because the situation is so wildly contrived.  There's a dreadful lack of nuance in much of the writing, and anyone playing an executive or businessman seems to be an evil bastard by default.  At the same time, it doesn't go hard enough on the worst consequences of rising temperatures, with too many major events happening offscreen.  We spend an awful lot of time with rich people discussing things in the abstract.  

The visions of a not-too-distant dystopia with a steadily declining quality of life are rendered very well, at least.  All the stories share the same universe and timeline, so we can watch the climate crisis unfold incrementally over multiple decades.  A few characters also recur, so a child in one episode will show up as an adult a few episodes later, and we can track the effects of some specific decisions and actions over time.  Technology continues to advance, so we can talk to whales by 2046, upload our memories into the cloud by 2059, and upload our whole consciousness by 2068.  Unfortunately, the recurring elements aren't too interesting, and the changes to the world come so fast that it's sometimes difficult to reconcile one story with the next.  It becomes harder and harder to reorient with each new time jump. 

At times "Extrapolations" feels like it's sharing conceptual real estate with "Black Mirror," though "Extrapolations" is much less pulpy.  It's more concerned with ideas over thrills and chills, but that may be to its detriment.  Many of the stories in "Extrapolations" are tragic and disheartening, but they're not very memorable.  At best, some of the earlier episodes make the theoretical end results of climate change feel more real, and introduce some concepts the general public probably aren't familiar with.  The Indian episode with the horrifying drought conditions best exemplify this.  At the same time, some of these outcomes feel too remote and fantastical, existing in the same world as AI nannies and memory backups for the human brain.             

Still, I like that Burns is ultimately optimistic about how we'll  battle climate change, giving his final episode a happy ending where the forces of greed and oppression are defeated, and humanity is given a second chance.  After eight hours of doom and gloom, it's a nice reminder that the future envisioned by "Extrapolations" isn't inevitable.  However, I wish the show had picked a lane - either something more grounded that showed how average people were dealing with the changing world, or something broader and more all-encompassing, to give us a big-picture look at how the crisis plays out.  "Extrapolations" tries to do both, and just winds up with fragmented, piecemeal results.   

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"Ted Lasso," Year Three

Mild spoilers ahead.  

It was a slog to get to the end of "Ted Lasso" this year.  Episode lengths ballooned, and a few installments were over an hour in length.  A lot of time was devoted to characters who spend most of their time apart from the Richmond team - notably Keeley and Nate - so we saw less of the all-important ensemble.  Keeley spends most of this year trying to keep her new PR firm afloat, and juggling relationships with her major backer, Jack (Jodi Balfour), an old friend, Shandy (Ambreen Razia), and a stern CFO, Barbara (Katy Wix).  Nate, meanwhile, suffers a crisis of conscience as the head coach of West Ham, and falls for Jade (Edyta Budnik), a hostess at his favorite restaurant.   The only real new presence at Richmond is a attention-seeking new star player named Zava (Maximilian Osinski), though we get more time with minor characters like Colin (Billy Harris), Zoreaux (Moe Jeudy-Lamour), and Trent Crimm (James Lance), who gets permission to shadow and write a book about the team.

It really doesn't feel like Ted gets his head on straight, and the show properly gets underway until the second half of the season.  Once it finds its groove, however, the pace picks up, and the show reaches a satisfying ending.  And that's the best outcome for "Ted Lasso," which probably could have gone on for several more seasons, but chose to leave us on a high note.  It was already seeing a major plateau in quality, and many of the characters really don't work as well in a vacuum.  I love Keeley, and Barbara turns out to be an enjoyable weirdo, but Keeley with Jack is dull as rocks, and Keeley with Shandy seems to result in steep IQ drops.  Nate is even worse.  Redeeming him is fine, but the pacing and emphasis is all wrong.  We spend too much time watching Nate being miserable and awkwardly courting Jade, and not enough on him making up for all the nastiness he put everyone through last season.  Most of the major reconciliations happen offscreen, which feels far too easy.

On the other hand, I loved the Rebecca storylines this year, where she finally lets go of her hatred for Rupert, and starts taking steps toward a next chapter for herself.  And Jamie and Roy's friendship goes through some interesting twists and turns, including a brief revival of their rivalry that ends exactly the way that it should.  I'm glad that Sam got another spotlight episode, and Colin's coming out storyline wasn't dragged out, and there was a musical number in the finale.  The one character who felt absent for too much of the season, however, was Ted.  Frankly, he barely has anything interesting to do for the first six episodes.  And because we don't see much of Ted, we don't see much of Beard or Leslie either, which is a shame.  While I appreciate that Ted's mental health troubles were handled pretty realistically, and weren't just something he could get over quickly, they ate up so much time and were such a downer, I don't think the show ever fully recovered.      

 

I wish I could say that the smarter, healthier Ted at the end of the third season was worth the wait, but in the end I wasn't watching the show for Ted anymore, the way I had been at the beginning.  He was honestly about the eighth or ninth most entertaining character by the finale, and if the show wants to continue without him, I'd be onboard.  I think the writers knew it too, because easily the best thing about the final few episodes was the careful inclusion or callback to just about every character we'd gotten to know and love over the course of the show - including Dr. Sharon, Sassy, Mae, the pub trio,   and even Michelle and Henry watching the final match from the U.S.  And thank goodness there was more football this year, to help carry the season through some of the rougher spots. 

There are some great moments in the third season, but I completely understand why many viewers chose not to finish it, or came away disappointed.   "Ted Lasso" had a perfect first year and the subsequent ones couldn't live up to it.   I found the quality never dipped to the point of being unacceptable, but I'm glad they chose to end the series when they did.  

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Your 2023 Emmy Nominees

The Emmys were supposed to happen this week, but are being delayed because of the strikes. I've done my yearly analysis piece already though, so it's arriving on schedule.

t's another year of being faced with too many good choices.  So it goes.  There are still signs of incumbency bias at play, with a couple of nominees like "The Crown" sticking around because they've been so popular in the past.  There are completely out of left field picks like "Obi-Wan Kenobi" showing up in Limited or Anthology Series.  As usual, I haven't watched enough of any of these categories to feel comfortable actually picking a winner based on merit or on politicking, but I'm a little more in the loop this year.  I've actually seen half of the eight Outstanding Comedy nominees, and all but two in Outstanding Drama.  I haven't watched "Succession" though, so the acting races are definitely beyond me.

As with all awards races, it's better to focus on who I'm happy made it in versus the expected snubs.  So, it's great to see Dominique Fishback here for "Swarm" and Ebon Moss-Bachrach for "The Bear" and everybody involved with "Beef."  Natasha Lyonne is in for "Poker Face"!  Keri Russell is in for "The Diplomat"!  Sharon Horgan is in for "Bad Sisters"!  And "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" is not eligible for any Oscars, contrary to what the ending credits would have you believe, but it's up for a bunch of Emmys, including Daniel Radcliff in the Movie/Limited Series Actor category.  Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman both got Guest Actor nominations for their episode of "The Last of Us."  "Jury Duty," despite being a Freevee original, got enough buzz to land in the Outstanding Comedy Series category.  And despite being kicked around by Warners, "The Nevers" still got one nomination, for Visual Effects.  

The real powerhouse this year, however, is "Succession," which snagged the most nominations, with "The Last of Us" close behind.  Add the nominations for "Barry," "The White Lotus," and "The House of the Dragon," and HBO is still comfortably dominating the Emmys.  Netflix didn't do too badly, with "Wednesday," "Beef," and "Dahmer" as its major contenders, but it's probably not going home with many statuettes.  And again, the only real representative of the networks was "Abbott Elementary."  There have been complaints over the years that the Emmys don't actually honor anything that regular people watch - no hide nor hair of any "Yellowstone" here - but this year doesn't strike me as too bad.  "Better Call Saul," "Barry," "Ted Lasso," "Succession," and "Mrs. Maisel" are getting their curtain calls.   The newcomers like "The Last of Us," "Andor," "The Bear," and "Wednesday" are promising, though they may not stick around for very long.  

As usual, there's all kinds of category fraud and lazy voting going on.  Good grief, did "White Lotus" really need nine nominations for supporting performances?  Did anybody watch anything else for these categories?  We didn't have room for Paddy Considine?  At least most of them won't be coming back next year, due to the quasi-anthology nature of "White Lotus."  How are Rhea Seehorn and Ayo Edibiri Supporting Actresses, while half the regulars on "Succession" are in the Lead Actor category? First time in history we've had three Outstanding Lead Actor nominees from the same show, so I guess the Roys aren't done battling it out.  And after the reorganization with the Daytime Emmys, game shows are now part of the Primetime Emmys.  It's weird and I really don't like it.  

With the writers' strike, this was always going to be a strange year, with a lot of the FYC events canceled or modified.  However, it's been quite a few strange years in a row, and I've always had less interest in keeping up with the Emmy races compared to the Oscars.  We already know who most of the winners will be, so it's less fun to actually root for anyone (except Jason Sudeikis can't win again, can he?)  It's also difficult to provide real commentary when it's so hard to keep up with television as a whole.  The best approach may be just to treat this as a nice recommendation smorgasbord, and to be happy that some underseen programs like "Fleishman is in Trouble" are getting some attention.  

And the ceremony itself is on Fox this year, so… yeah.

I'm Happy That "Beau is Afraid"

Ari Aster is cashing in some sort of blank check for his latest film, which is a three hour art film about a deeply anxious man trying to visit his mother.  It feels very much like Aster is trying to do his own take on the Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry school of existential dread comedy, complete with constantly shifting frames of reality, a deeply damaged male protagonist, and painstakingly composed Surrealist frames that are packed with visual information.  Aster is not Kaufman, and unable to access the deeper wells of humanity and insight that make films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" so poignant.  However, he is a lot funnier and nuttier.

Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in a miserable apartment in an anarchic, crime-ridden city, where every day is a battle against chaos and depravity.  He wants to go visit his wealthy mother Mona (Patti Lupone), but catastrophe after catastrophe prevents this.  We're clearly not meant to be taking any of this literally, but rather as an allegorical representation of how reality looks to Beau.  It's a dreadful existence, where monsters and maniacs lurk around every corner wearing human faces.  Every interaction with another person is rife with misunderstandings and terrible consequences.  Everyone seems to hate him or is hostile to him for no reason, and Beau's soft-spoken, mumbled attempts to explain himself just make things worse.  

I don't think that "Beau is Afraid" accomplishes everything that it sets out to do, and is way too indulgent for its own good.  However, I respect and admire its seemingly boundless ambition.  There's a long digression in the second act for a fantasy sequence, where Beau imagines himself living out another life in a stylized, animated landscape.  There are a couple of wild action sequences, the first involving Beau getting chased out of his apartment while stark naked, the second involving a kill-happy combat veteran named Jeeves (Denis Menochet) keen on annihilating him.  The ending involves a show trial sequence, which Beau attends in a rowboat.  A lot of the twists  and turns of the plot feel inane or arbitrary, but the talent involved is top notch, and deeply committed to the absurdity the whole way through.           

I'll watch Joaquin Phoenix in just about anything, but I adore him as Beau, this hapless, terrified soul who is constantly fleeing from one bad situation to the next.  He's constantly injured, always in some state of dishevelment, and perpetually uncomfortable.  Up against a world where everyone is yelling at him, disappointed with him, or sees him as a target to be obliterated, Beau is a deer forever in the headlights, too paralyzed with terror to do more than react instinctively in most situations.  He's incredibly sympathetic, because everything is against him, but at the same time there are a few little moments that suggest that we're not getting the whole truth from Beau's deeply subjective point of view.  There's an interpretation of "Beau is Afraid" that suggests that Beau is actually a malevolent, terrible human being who is seeing events in the most favorable light to himself, where he's the victim of everyone he's actually wronged.  Surrealist films are neat like that.  Watching Beau's total inability to deal with any situation is often also very, very funny.

The filmmaking is endlessly impressive, of course.  Ari Aster's oppressive visuals can turn ordinary places into horror hellscapes, and that's certainly true here.  However, the point of "Beau" is not only to frighten and disturb, but to explore many different corners of Beau's psyche, including flashbacks to a more idyllic boyhood with a younger, nicer version of his mother (Zoe Lister-Jones), and encounters with other strange people, including a seemingly kind couple played by Amy Smart and Nathan Lane.  Thus, the action moves from darkened forests to suburban homes to fantastical worlds - all lovingly designed and realized with great attention to detail.  The sound design is especially impactful, using layers of different sounds, some muffled and almost inaudible, to affect the mood and atmosphere.    

 

I don't think I would have enjoyed "Beau is Afraid" so much when I was younger, and I hadn't encountered this kind of film before.  I would have been more inclined to take Beau's terror at face value, and miss the way the jump scares frequently doubled as punchlines, and how Beau is clearly a very, very unreliable narrator.  I wouldn't have been inclined to simply enjoy the weirdness for its own sake, even if I can't shake the feeling that I've seen so much of it before.  (Is that a "Lisztomania" reference in the final act?!)  There is no reason for "Beau is Afraid" to exist, with so much nudity, with so much insanity, and did I mention it's three hours long?  But it does, and I'm glad it does.

  

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Two Meg Ryan Movies

I watched a couple of Meg Ryan romantic comedies from the 90s this week, including two that were new to me: "French Kiss" and "Addicted to Love."  Neither are very good and neither made much of a cultural impact, but they form a fascinating time capsule of the way romantic comedies used to be, when they regularly made a nice profit at the box office, and were able to attract top drawer talent.  Meg Ryan was second only to Julia Roberts as the go-to leading lady of '90s romances, but I'd only seen three of her films that really fell into that category: "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail" with Tom Hanks, and in "When Harry Met Sally…" with Billy Crystal.  And it's honestly been so long that I didn't remember much about her performances.

So it was a nice treat to be reintroduced to Meg Ryan as a movie star in her prime, who plays an uptight American neurotic in "French Kiss" named Kate (she's played a lot of Kates) against Kevin Kline's charming French rogue Anton, who seems to be doing an impression of Gerard Depardieu from "Green Card."  Ryan has wonderful comic timing and radiates charm and appeal.  In both "French Kiss" and "Addicted to Love" she and her love interest are initially hostile to each other, but warm up over time.  And in both films a major turning point is a wardrobe change for Ryan, involving a low-cut sleeveless dress that leaves her romantic partner speechless with admiration.  It's a common trope, of course, but few actresses have pulled it off quite so convincingly.  

Ryan has more to do in "French Kiss," as Kate is our major POV character throughout.  After being dumped by her fiance, she follows him to France, gets mixed up in a scheme of Kline's, and eventually the two end up together.  Lawrence Kasdan directed, from a script by Adam Brooks.  There are a lot of the usual pratfalls and physical comedy bits that modern romantic comedies rely so heavily on, but also a lot of time with Ryan and Kline simply spending time together and having pleasant conversations.  Kline's schemes with an illegally transported grape vine and a stolen necklace provide an excuse for him to have to stick close to the exasperating American, but it never feels like the point of the film.  And while Ryan is terrified of flying, is lactose intolerant, and has a lot of biases against the French, she never feels like a caricature.  Is she treading awfully close to Sally from "When Harry Met Sally…"?  Yes, but Kate is a little more prickly than Sally, which I appreciate.  

In "Addicted to Love," the directing debut of Griffin Dunne, Ryan's character is Maggie, a photographer, and I was surprised to discover she's actually a supporting character.  In all the posters, she's placed front and center.  The main character is Matthew Broderick's jilted Sam, essentially playing the role Ryan did in "French Kiss."  His fiancee dumps him for a Frenchman with a restaurant in Greenwich Village, so Sam tracks them down, takes up residence in the abandoned building across from theirs, and sets up surveillance equipment.  Maggie is the Frenchman's jilted ex, who becomes Sam's co-stalker, co-conspirator in revenge, and eventual lover.   Maggie lets Ryan play a more off-kilter character, a wild child type with thick eyeliner and a more colorful wardrobe.  However, it's still the sleeveless little white dress that knocks Sam for a loop.  

Both films have their charms, but neither are very strong.  I think it's telling that Meg Ryan really isn't at her best in either of them.  Kevin Kline acts circles around her in "French Kiss," despite the hammy accent, but then he tends to get the better material.  There are multiple scenes of him falling in love with her, but you blink and you miss the moment she falls for him.  As for "Addicted to Love," Matthew Broderick has at least as many scenes getting to know his rival, played by Tcheky Karyo, as he does with Ryan's Maggie.  She's a fun presence in the film, sort of a grungy precursor of the manic-pixie-dreamgirl, as she encourages Sam's meaner impulses, but pretty limited.  The director seems more interested in the revenge story than the budding romance, which is a shame, because Broderick and Ryan pair pretty well together.    

Meg Ryan famously became pigeonholed as a romantic comedy actress, and her career declined when her looks did.  I understand why the current generation of performers wants to avoid the same fate.  However, it's such a nice change of pace to find films like this - romantic comedies that are full of the old tropes and character types, but carried by really talented actors and filmmakers who are taking the endeavor seriously.  It takes real skill and commitment to do screen romance at this level, and it's such a shame that the whole genre's been so devalued.  We're down to a few bigger titles every year, but mostly combined with other genres.  It's almost always romantic-comedy-action films now.  And it's kinda sad. 

 There's no reason Zendaya and Anya Taylor Joy shouldn't be doing movies like these between their superhero and arthouse horror features.  And I'm very curious how "Ghosted" would have turned out if the filmmakers were brave enough to leave out the silly spy plot and all the action scenes - and just let Ana de Armas and Chris Evans getting romantic be the main event.      

      

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Finishing "The Nevers"

This isn't a review of the last six episodes of "The Nevers," because after all the trouble I took to watch this show, I ended up not remotely interested in anything it was doing.  If you've seen the first half of the season, the second half is more of the same.  It's nice to have a definitive ending for these characters, but it's not a very satisfying one. I'm honestly a little relieved that "The Nevers" is over so that the talented cast can move on to better projects.  Laura Donnelly already has, having recently popped up in Marvel's "Werewolf By Night."

Instead, I want to talk about how difficult it was to watch "The Nevers," thanks to the regime change at Warners and subsequent cancellation splurge in the name of cost cutting.  The first half of "The Nevers" aired on HBO in 2021 and was made available on the HBO Max (now just Max) streaming service.  The second half was completed, but not released for nearly two years.  When the show was canceled in late 2022, and it was announced that the show would be removed from HBO Max, fans were worried that we wouldn't see the second half of the season at all.  Instead, the whole series was moved to the Fox-owned, ad-supported streamer Tubi, along with other titles like "Raised by Wolves" and "Westworld."  Problem solved, right?  

Well, the new episodes of "The Nevers" were aired mid-week in February, and have been re-aired several times on one of Tubi's linear channels, which is programmed like live television.  They weren't available on demand, and you couldn't purchase them through Itunes or other platforms, so you essentially had to watch these episodes live - if live was an option.  Some countries don't have access to Tubi's live channels.  It was several months before I was finally able to catch all the episodes. To date, they're still not available to buy or rent through any other platform.

I know I've made jokes before about streaming turning into linear television, but this is literally streaming turning into linear television.  "The Nevers" is an extremely unusual case, but it's indicative of streaming going through some serious growing pains now that the initial rush for market share is over.  Warners' decision to push several of their expensive, high profile titles to Tubi points to deep dysfunctionality in their streaming business model.  Of all the subscription based streamers, Netflix is still the only one that seems to be consistently profitable, though it's too early to tell for many of the others.

But since the genie can't be put back in the bottle, and traditional broadcast television seems to be doomed to obsolescence, we're suddenly seeing a rush to promote free, ad supported TV (FAST) streamers like Pluto, Freevee/IMDB TV and Tubi.  This is where a ton of older and more obscure media titles are ending up.  I've noticed a significant increase in the classic films I've been able to find on free services lately, including an obscure Melvin van Peebles documentary I was sure I was going to have to pay in order to view.  This might be the model that ends up making the most economic sense in the long run  - most of the other streamers including Netflix are adding ad supported tiers, and apparently Fox's CEO turned down multiple offers to buy Tubi. 

This is not a bad thing, especially if it helps our content producers stay in business.  A shift away from subscription services and toward FAST services will get more content to more people, avoiding some of the siloing problems that we've been seeing.  I expect that the flood of new content will also slow down on most services, especially the higher budget projects like "Westworld" that require heftier residual payments.  We'll also see more shows being produced with ad breaks in mind.  

Part of me is disappointed that HBO Max and other ambitious streamers are going to have to downgrade their offerings to stay in business.  Part of me figures that this was going to happen eventually, one way or another.  The hassle of trying to keep track of content coming and going on different services has been a constant, and the return of appointment television for "The Nevers" certainly beats never getting to watch those last six episodes at all.  The streaming revolution was fun while it lasted.

And the more things change, the more they stay the same.    

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Podcasts Ahoy! 2023 Edition

Time to go back through my playlist and take stock of the entertainment-related podcasts that I've been listening to.  Below are a couple of new and new-to-me offerings that I've started following in the past eighteen-ish months since my last podcast post.

Disniyversity - This has quickly become my favorite Disney podcast, to the extent that I'm hoarding the remaining episodes that I haven't listened to.  Film journalist Ben Travis and academic Dr. Sam Summers go through the Disney animated feature canon, film by film, starting from "Snow White" and working their way toward the present day.  Each episode is nicely structured, adding plenty of context and history, highlighting individual animators, and closing out with discussions of each film's cultural legacy.  I like that the hosts are both very familiar with Disney output, but are only watching some of these films for the first time, and can offer some fresh reactions.  I like that they're both utter nerds, and have instituted a pantheon of "Disniyversity Legends" for overlooked characters that include Lady Cluck from "Robin Hood" and Bill the Lizard.  My only, very mild complaint, is that the episodes are currently only being released monthly, and I'm getting through the backlog much too quickly. 

The Kingcast - Film writers and horror fanatics Eric Vespe and Scott Wampler host a podcast devoted to all things Stephen King, but primarily the media that has been adapted from his work.  Unlike Disniversity, this podcast is not trying to be comprehensive.  Aside from a few specific installments devoted to certain topics, each guest gets to pick what they want to talk about, so many films and stories are discussed multiple times.  "The Shining" and "IT" are the most popular choices by far.  The variety of guests has been great, and includes actors, filmmakers, other writers, and even Stephen King himself in one very special interview.  My favorites to date have been the two episodes featuring German comedian Flula Borg, who is much less familiar with Stephen King than most of the other guests.  Vespe and Wampler are always enthusiastic and entertaining, and I hope that they get their "Revival" movie someday.  

The Ringer-verse - This is actually a group of different podcasts, including "The Midnight Boys," "The House of R" and "The Prestige TV Podcast."  I primarily listen to "The House of R," hosted by Johanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin because Robinson has been one of my favorite podcasters for ages, but I check in on the others occasionally, usually depending on what they're covering in specific episodes.  These are all essentially pop culture discussion shows, focusing on the current series or movie or big geek announcement of the day.  "The Midnight Boys" and "The House of R" focus on genre fare like superhero and fantasy media, while "The Prestige TV Podcast" offers takes on more highbrow shows like "Succession" and "The White Lotus."  This is sort of working for me as a "Firewall and Iceberg" substitute, though I wish the coverage were more broad.  "Ringer-verse" only looks at the biggest titles and franchises in the pop culture conversation, which is perfectly fine.  They've produced some great, in-depth, nerdy rambles that I have enjoyed thoroughly.

The Problem With Jon Stewart - Finally, I haven't been keeping up with Jon Stewart's new Apple TV+ show, but I find myself tuning in to the accompanying weekly podcast more and more often.  This one snuck in via Youtube clips, which I often mistook for segments from the show.  I prefer Stewart in this format, just talking about the news of the day with his incredibly well-informed staff, or going more in depth on subjects that are Too Big for TV.  I rarely listen to the whole show, usually skipping the interviews, but I did the same thing with "The Daily Show" back when he was host.  

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2022-2023

I didn't watch "Succession" or "Barry" and probably won't in the future.  I keep meaning to start "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," but it didn't happen this year.  Nonetheless, I watched a lot of television - more than enough to have come up with a Top Ten episodes list for the year.  

A quick reminder before we start that I'm a big genre nerd, don't watch enough comedies, and have a neverending "To Watch" list.  I use the Emmy rules for cutoff dates, which means that this list covers everything from the summer of 2022 to the spring of 2023.   Entries are unranked, and I'm limiting myself to one episode per show or miniseries.  I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum.

And here we go: 

The Sandman, "The Sound of Her Wings" - This is not the version of this story that I had been imagining in my head for twenty years, but it's the one that was right for 2022.  I couldn't have asked for a better Death in Kirby Howell Baptiste, and my biggest complaint about the season is that she only appeared in one episode.  I like the second half, with the adaptation of "Men of Good Fortune" even better, thanks to the new tweaks to the ending, and Ferdinand Kingsley's Hob Gadling.

House of the Dragon, "The Lord of the Tides" - Paddy Considine's King Viserys only grew more compelling as he became more decrepit over time, finally making his most memorable appearance during a fight over the legitimacy of Rhaenyra's children.  It's a fantastic reminder of how fragile the peace of Westeros is, and how much Viserys cares about his family.  The episode represents the calm before the storm  - and gave a great character a memorable sendoff.

Beef, "The Great Fabricator" - The show's penultimate episode is where our protagonists finally hit bottom.  All the tensions between Danny and Amy have finally boiled over, and both characters are fully committed to destroying each other.  The situation keeps escalating and escalating, resulting in the show's most elaborate action sequences.  The whole series sometimes feels like rubbernecking a car crash, and at this point it's impossible to look away.

Andor, "One Way Out" - Jailbreak episodes are so much fun, and "Andor" has one of the best in recent memory.  The show did a great job of setting up the oppressive world of the prison, and building up the stakes over the previous episodes, so I was expecting something special.  I wasn't disappointed.  The production quality is fantastic, Andy Serkis gives one of the best performances of his career, and I completely forgot I was watching a "Star Wars" show. 

The Bear, "Review" - This one shot, incredibly tense real time episode sees a nightmare shift unfold at the Beef, where everything falls apart.  Several ongoing storylines come to a head, there's violence, there's truth telling, and several characters hit their limits.  This was the first episode of "The Bear" I saw, and it convinced me to watch the rest of the series.  And the second time I watched it, with all the context of the other episodes, was an entirely different experience. 

Documentary Now! "Trouver Frisson" - I only started watching "Documentary Now!" this past year, and found it to be one of the most delightful and most niche comedies of all time.  And who is going to appreciate the show's recent, spot-on Agnes Varda spoof if not me?  "Trouver Frisson" nails Varda's filmmaking style, her whimsical sense of humor, and her endless Gallic charms.  They even go so far as to create a parody of her Cine Tamaris production logo!  

Interview With the Vampire, "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding" - They aged up the child vampire, Claudia, into a teenager, along with changing her race and circumstances, but to very good effect.  Bailey Bass is wonderfully unnerving as this episode introduces her - a spoiled, reckless brat who is denied maturity, pushing her to rebel in the most destructive ways she can.  So much of the story hinges on Claudia, and this new version of her couldn't be more perfect.

Rick and Morty, "Bethic Twinstinct" - Beth and Jerry's screwed up relationship is one of my favorite parts of the show, and it's been far too long since it's gotten the spotlight.  This episode throws Space Beth into the mix, who visits for Thanksgiving and ends up in a relationship with herself.  How the situation resolves with Jerry is one of the most delightfully awful things that the show has ever done, reaching a level of depravity that will have the Smith kids in therapy for decades.  

Fleishman is in Trouble, "God, What an Idiot He Was!" - I had some trouble picking an episode for this miniseries, but in the end I decided on the formally playful episode where Toby realizes that Rachel is in a relationship with someone else, as told through twelve individually labeled vignettes.  He goes through multiple coping mechanisms, fantasies, deflections, and finally unhappy acceptance of reality.  It's probably not the best episode, but the one I feel best exemplifies the show.

Better Call Saul, " Saul Gone" - Finally, my favorite series finale of the last year belonged to "Better Call Saul."  The cameos weren't the best idea, and I didn't need all the flashbacks, but Saul's final appearance in court to answer for his crimes, and the final meeting between him and Kim remain near and dear to my heart.  I'm very sorry to see this series - and this universe - come to an end.  

Honorable Mentions:

Star Trek: Picard  - Finally, it's pandering, it's repetitive, and it takes the easy way out, but it was so good to get a proper goodbye to the whole crew of the USS Enterprise D.  "Star Trek" still has the best shared universe of any of the current franchises, and this reunion was seriously overdue.  

Saturday Night Live, "Pedro Pascal" - 10/10. No notes.

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